


Keep Your Secrets With You

by Elanor



Category: War Horse (2011)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-16
Updated: 2012-02-16
Packaged: 2017-10-31 06:45:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/341133
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elanor/pseuds/Elanor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war ends, and Jamie's life moves on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep Your Secrets With You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [moosewingz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/moosewingz/gifts).



Jamie dies with Jim but James lives on, relatively comfortably cosseted in a POW camp for most of the war.

*

He marries, actually, a few years after the war ends. A nice girl from his hometown--their mothers had set them up. A quiet girl, slim with a round face, and altogether too perceptive eyes.

It's not a love match, and they both know it.

They get along, though. James performs his duties, and she produces two children, a boy and a girl, plump smiling things that cry whenever James holds them.

*

The boy is named James, Jim for short, and everybody assumes he's named him after himself.

(Charlie, of course, knows better.)

*

James cries the first time he sees Jim on a horse, galloping and whooping like a madman, wild and young and carefree.

*

After James dies in his sleep at the venerable age of 78, Jim is clearing out his desk when he finds a small leather folder, well-worn and clearly well-loved, at the bottom of a drawer under a pile of papers.

The leather supple underneath his fingers, he opens it to find dozens and dozens of pencil sketches. Almost all are of his father when he was young, as he must have been--laughing, glaring, sleeping with a look of peace Jim had never seen on his face until it lay in death. The thick creamy sheets of paper are carefully filed, edges thin with repeated handling over the years. All are signed by a "Jim Nicholls", which Jim thinks sounds vaguely familiar but can't quite place.

He shrugs and puts the folder aside. Perhaps his daughter will like to look at it.

*

(Jim loved to sketch Jamie in the quiet light of the early morning, just before dawn broke. He liked to sit in the chair next to the bed, smiling to himself as he studied Jamie's familiar features. He loved the way his forehead crinkled in sleep and his mouth hung slightly open, the way his fringe, usually combed so neatly, fell into his eyes and mingled with his eyelashes. He loved a lot of things about this friend of his, prickly and stiff and an utter pillock at times as he was.

Jamie stirred as the clouds outside parted and the sunlight from the window hit his face.

"Urrghfh," he mumbled into his pillow.

Jim stood up and kissed him on the cheek, whacking him playfully with his sketchbook. "Time to wake up, you lazy bum."

"Not if I can help it," muttered Jamie, catching hold of Jim's wrist and jerking him down onto the bed with him. "Aufghusfahs."

"That's right, you tell them," Jim said wryly, patting Jamie's head, now half-buried under the sheets.

"Ushfhuagh," retorts Jamie, nudging his head into Jim's waist.

Jim sighed, and sat back against the headboard. "Oh, very well." His fingers found his way into Jamie's hair, stroking the auburn strands gently. Jamie hummed quietly in pleasure, and Jim smiled to himself, a small secret smile, and was, for the moment, content.)

*


End file.
